Hindutva, Media Power and the Politics of Hate: Mohan J. Dutta on the Struggle for Democratic Voice

Part One

Abhish K. Bose : Post-9/11 we blamed US funding. But today, with IT cells, WhatsApp universities and a global Hindutva diaspora network, has Hindutva built a self-sustaining Islamophobia industry that now exports hate back to the West?

Mohan J Dutta  : Yes, and the story of that transformation is the story of the last twenty-five years of Hindutva’s political economy. In the years after 9/11, reports such as The Foreign Exchange of Hate documented how diaspora dollars, routed through charitable fronts in the United States, funded the Sangh’s infrastructure in India. The direction of flow seemed clear. The West, and particularly the US after 9/11, supplied the global grammar of Islamophobia and much of the money, and Hindutva localized it.

What our research has tracked since is the emergence of something qualitatively different: an industrialized, self-reproducing apparatus for the manufacture of anti-Muslim hate. The BJP’s IT cell operates as a professionalized disinformation factory, with paid workers, volunteer cadres, coordinated hashtag campaigns, and content calendars. The WhatsApp university metaphor captures a deeper structural shift, the everyday pedagogy of hate delivered into hundreds of millions of family groups, where forwarded fabrications about love jihad, land jihad, spit jihad, and population jihad do the daily work of turning neighbours into threats. This apparatus no longer needs external subsidy. It is monetized through platform capitalism itself, through the attention economy that rewards outrage, and it is politically subsidized by a ruling party for which the fear of the Muslim is the core legitimizing trope.

The export dimension is what I want to insist on, because it is the least understood. In our work at the Center I direct, Center for Culture-centred Approach to Research and Evaluation (CARE) examining the digital ecosystem of Islamophobic hate after the March 15 terrorist attack in Christchurch, an attack that took place in the country I live and work in, our research team observed Hindutva accounts in sustained dialogue with white supremacist accounts and with far-right Zionist accounts. These are three formations with distinct histories that have converged on a shared enemy image of the Muslim. Hindutva accounts amplify great replacement narratives and translate them into the Indian idiom of demographic jihad. White supremacist accounts pick up love jihad framing and recirculate it in European and North American contexts. Far-right Zionist networks supply the counter-jihad vocabulary that treats every Muslim as a civilizational threat, and Hindutva accounts return the favour by positioning India and Israel as twin frontline states. The Christchurch terrorist’s manifesto itself circulated approvingly in Hindutva digital spaces, and Hindutva trolls celebrated the massacre. This is why I argue that the RSS must be understood within global chains of Islamophobia, as a terrorist organization in the substantive sense of the term, an organization whose cadres and affiliates have organized and legitimized violence against Muslims for a century and whose communicative infrastructure now feeds the transnational circuits from which attacks like Christchurch emerge.

None of this apparatus fell from the sky, and the diaspora built more of it than is commonly acknowledged. The dominant-caste professional diaspora occupies a peculiar structural position that my work has examined closely. It enjoys the casteist mobility promised by empire, the H-1B and skilled migration pipelines that select for the English-medium, engineering-credentialed profiles that caste privilege in India produces, and at the same time it lives inside the racism and white supremacy of the societies it migrates into. Hindu pride and Hindu chauvinism offer this diaspora a resolution, a framework for asserting identity that answers the daily humiliations of racism with the compensations of civilizational supremacy. That is the psychic economy of diaspora Hindutva. The material contribution is even more direct. The IT segments of the diaspora built the network structure of Hindutva, from the earliest Hindu nationalist websites and email lists of the 1990s, through the digital architecture of the Sangh’s global organizational web, to the seeding of the meme and troll cultures that the IT cell later professionalized at home. Hindutva went online early and skillfully because its diaspora was the internet’s workforce.

The funding architecture reveals the same asymmetry, and it deserves naming as policy. Inside India, the FCRA, the Foreign Contribution Regulation Act, has been weaponized to silence civil society and repress religious freedom, stripping licences from Amnesty International, from Christian and Muslim charities including the Missionaries of Charity, from thousands of organizations whose work with the margins made them suspect, so that the constitutional freedom of association is now administered as a privilege of loyalty. At the very same time, RSS networks move money globally through a web of affiliate organizations, the sevas, cultural foundations, and educational charities through which diaspora funds have been documented flowing toward Sangh projects, the circuits that The Foreign Exchange of Hate first traced and that subsequent investigations have mapped in the US, UK, and beyond. The state chokes the funding of those who defend pluralism and keeps open the pipelines of those who disrupt peace and security. One hand of the regime closes civil society’s accounts while the other hand wires the movement’s.

So the answer is yes. Hindutva today runs a trade surplus in hate. The diaspora that once wired money home now wires ideology outward, through Hindu supremacist organizations in the US, UK, Canada, Australia, and Aotearoa New Zealand that lobby governments, capture multicultural policy spaces, and feed content into the global far right. What began as an import substitution project has become an export industry.

As Hindi-Hindutva TV and English digital platforms capture national ad money, political access, and algorithmic reach, how are they systematically dismantling Kerala, Tamil Nadu and Bengal’s regional media, and what does that mean for democratic voice in non-Hindi India? Is non-Hindi India losing its last democratic counterweight?

The federalism of India’s media system has historically been one of its most underappreciated democratic resources. Kerala’s newspaper culture, embedded in the highest literacy rates in the country and a public sphere shaped by Left and social reform movements, Tamil Nadu’s Dravidian media ecology with its long anti-Brahminical tradition, and Bengal’s culture of political argument sustained plural publics that the Hindi heartland’s consolidation could never fully absorb. These regional media systems have functioned as counterweights precisely because they are anchored in linguistic worlds, political histories, and caste configurations that resist the Hindi-Hindu-Hindustan equation at the heart of Hindutva.

What we are witnessing is a systematic squeeze on this pluralism, operating through three mechanisms. First, the political economy of advertising. Government advertising, which is a lifeline for much of Indian media, is wielded as reward and punishment, and national advertisers follow the signals of political power. Money flows to the Hindi and English channels that perform loyalty, and it is withdrawn from regional outlets that report critically. Second, regulatory coercion. The 48-hour blackout of Malayalam channels for their Delhi violence coverage, the security clearance denial to MediaOne, and raids on critical newsrooms communicate to every regional editor what the price of independence is. Third, and this is where my work on platform capitalism comes in, algorithmic reach. The recommendation systems of YouTube, Facebook, and X privilege the high-volume, high-outrage content of national Hindi and English operations, while regional language journalism, which is more expensive to produce and less optimized for virality, is buried. The algorithm performs a quiet centralization that no censor needs to order.

The consequence for democratic voice is severe because language is the infrastructure of democratic participation. When a Malayalam or Tamil speaker’s access to critical journalism narrows, what narrows is her capacity to hold power accountable in the language in which she lives her citizenship. This is a question of communicative equality, the concept at the core of my work. Communicative equality asks whether the resources for producing and circulating voice are distributed justly. The dismantling of regional media is a massive redistribution of communicative resources toward the Hindi-Hindutva centre.

Is non-Hindi India losing its last counterweight? At the level of television, largely yes. But I would resist the fatalism. Kerala’s public sphere continues to generate resistant journalism, Tamil digital spaces sustain Dravidian counter-publics, and Bengal remains contested terrain. The question is whether these residual capacities can be built into durable voice infrastructures before the squeeze completes itself. That is an organizing question, and I return to it in my answer on NWICO.

From cow vigilantism to Ram temple politics, is the Indian state now using religion as law enforcement, and has this made it impossible for Muslims and Dalits to claim equal citizenship in public?

I would put it more sharply. Religion has become the operating system of the state, and law enforcement has become one of its applications. Consider the architecture. Cow protection laws criminalize the food practices and livelihoods of Muslims and Dalits, and cow vigilantism operates as outsourced state violence, with lynch mobs enjoying impunity, garlanded by ministers, their victims charged with the crimes committed against them. Anti-conversion laws and love jihad laws place Muslim men under permanent legal suspicion and Hindu women under patriarchal surveillance. Bulldozer justice, the demolition of Muslim homes as extra-judicial collective punishment, turns municipal machinery into an instrument of communal terror. The Citizenship Amendment Act writes religion into the citizenship law of a constitutionally secular republic for the first time. And the Ram temple consecration, with the Prime Minister officiating as ritual patron in an event broadcast as a state occasion, completed the symbolic fusion. The state now performs Hindu-ness as its own identity.

In my meta-synthesis of the scholarship on Hindutva’s Islamophobia, I describe this as the legal inscription of unbelonging. What lynching does episodically, law does permanently. It converts the Muslim from citizen into suspect, from rights-bearer into supplicant. Citizenship becomes conditional, something Muslims must continuously earn through performances of loyalty that are never sufficient, while Hindu-ness functions as the unmarked default of national belonging.

For Dalits, the mechanism is different and equally corrosive, and here my argument about Hindutva as a project of Brahminical hegemony is essential. Hindutva incorporates Dalits symbolically, celebrating Ambedkar’s statue while gutting Ambedkar’s constitutionalism, recruiting Dalit foot soldiers for anti-Muslim violence while preserving the caste order that dispossesses them. Cow politics illustrates the trap perfectly. Dalits who work with cattle carcasses and hides are flogged in Una in the name of the same cow that is invoked to lynch Muslims. The promise of inclusion in the Hindu fold is the promise of a subordinate place within Brahminical hierarchy, purchased by directing Dalit anger away from caste and toward the Muslim.

So has equal citizenship in public become impossible? For Muslims, public equality now carries a price of vulnerability, from the namaz offered under threat to the name on the doorplate during a riot. For Dalits, the constitutional promise is being hollowed while its author is garlanded. Impossibility is a strong word, and communities continue to claim public space with extraordinary courage, from Shaheen Bagh to Bhima Koregaon. But they claim it against the state rather than with its protection, and that inversion tells us what the republic has become.

After the 48-hour blackout of Malayalam channels and the wall-to-wall riot coverage, are we past the tipping point where Indian TV no longer reports news but manufactures consent for the state?

At the level of national television, we are past that point, and the two events you name mark the threshold with precision. The blackout of Asianet News and MediaOne punished Malayalam channels for doing journalism, for reporting the targeted violence against Muslims in northeast Delhi as targeted violence. Simultaneously, the dominant Hindi and English channels covered the same violence as a riot of equivalence, and in the months that followed converted the victims into perpetrators, running a sustained campaign that framed the anti-CAA movement itself as the conspiracy behind the violence. Punishment for accurate reporting on one side, reward for inversion on the other. That is the disciplinary structure of manufactured consent.

In our ongoing content and cluster analysis at CARE of a decade of Republic TV and Times Now broadcasts, we have been mapping how television constructed the figure of the anti-national, taking the case of Umar Khalid, a scholar who has now spent years in prison without trial. What the analysis shows is method rather than excess. Night after night, the studios assemble the same grammar: the doctored clip, the shouted question that functions as verdict, the graphic that renders a student as a terrorist, the sources that are never named because they are the state itself. This is what I call communicative inversion in my theoretical work, the systematic turning of meaning against itself, where the victim becomes the aggressor, the dissenter becomes the terrorist, and the lynch mob becomes the aggrieved. Herman and Chomsky’s propaganda model described consent manufactured through structural filters. Indian television has advanced the model. Consent is manufactured through spectacle, through the nightly ritual production of the internal enemy, with the Muslim as the enemy’s primary face.

What makes this consent machine distinctive is its fusion with the digital hate apparatus. The studio clip becomes the WhatsApp forward becomes the troll campaign becomes the FIR. Television no longer stands apart from the IT cell; it is the broadcast wing of the same architecture. The exceptions, the handful of digital outlets and regional channels still doing journalism, prove the rule by the punishment they attract. When the practice of journalism itself becomes the marker of the anti-national, the tipping point is behind us.

NWICO failed because the West walked out. Today with Meta, X and digital Hindutva controlling narrative, what new infrastructure must Dalits, Muslims and regional language communities build, or will they be permanently de-platformed?

NWICO is the unfinished business of decolonization in the communicative realm, and I return to it constantly in my work. The MacBride Commission named the problem exactly: the flows of information in the world order were structured by colonial inheritance, one-directional, concentrated, and controlled by the metropole. The demand was for communicative sovereignty, for many voices in one world. The US and UK walked out of UNESCO rather than concede, and the neoliberal turn buried the agenda. What we have now is NWICO’s nightmare fulfilled at a scale the MacBride Commission could not have imagined. Three or four US corporations control the communicative infrastructure of the planet, their algorithms opaque, their moderation regimes indifferent to the languages of the global South, their business models structurally aligned with the outrage economies that Hindutva has mastered.

The framework I work with, the culture-centered approach, the CCA, offers a way of reading this moment and of organizing within it. The CCA begins from the interplay of structure, culture, and agency, attending to how structures organize the erasure of the margins, how culture forms the ground of meaning-making, and how agency, the everyday capacity of communities to interpret their worlds and act on them, persists within and against structure. At the heart of the CCA lies the concept of voice infrastructures, the material, organizational, and communicative resources through which communities at the margins produce, own, and circulate their voices. The theoretical anchors are communicative equality, the just distribution of the resources of voice, and communicative justice, the transformation of the structures that produce erasure. The lesson of our work across community sites, from Santali Adivasi villages to migrant worker organizing in Singapore to advisory boards with Māori, migrant, and refugee communities here in Aotearoa, is that voice cannot be borrowed from infrastructures owned by those with an interest in erasing it. It has to be built.

And it is being built. Against the captured heights of television, the last decade has seen a remarkable proliferation of independent digital media in India, and I read this proliferation through the CCA as agency asserting itself against structure. NewsLaundry sustains media critique on a subscription model whose slogan, when the public pays, the public is served, is itself an argument about communicative political economy. The News Minute anchors independent journalism in the southern states, The Wire and Scroll carry the investigative and analytical work the corporate newsrooms abandoned, The Citizen holds space for reportage from the margins.

A new generation of journalists has rebuilt the interview and the ground report as popular forms, Saurabh Dwivedi carrying Hindi journalism to millions without surrendering Hindi to Hindutva, Samdish Bhatia with Unfiltered walking through the rally and the street with a microphone and patience, Priyanshi Sharma with Peek TV, and channels such as News Pinch and The Red Mike taking political conversation to publics that television abandoned. Independent creators, Dhruv Rathee and Akash Banerjee among them, have built audiences in the tens of millions for explainer and satire formats that puncture the propaganda cycle, often reaching the very WhatsApp publics the IT cell claims as its own.

The state’s response tells us how much this matters. The assault on NewsClick, the raids on dozens of journalists’ and contributors’ homes, the seizure of devices, the UAPA case against its founder Prabir Purkayastha, who was jailed for months before the Supreme Court declared his arrest illegal, was an attack on precisely the kind of journalism the regime cannot absorb. NewsClick’s critical work, its sustained coverage of the farmers’ movement, of workers’ struggles, of the Left, of the political economy of Hindutva, connected journalism to organizing, and that connection is what was being punished. In the CCA’s reading, the attack on NewsClick was an attack on a voice infrastructure, on the material capacity of movements to narrate themselves.

Deeper still lies the work of building voice at the margins of the margins, and this is where my scholarship and my politics sit. The People’s Archive of Rural India, PARI, founded by P. Sainath, is to my mind one of the most significant communicative experiments anywhere in the world, a living archive in which the labour, languages, songs, and struggles of rural India, of Adivasi, Dalit, fisher, farmer, and weaver communities, are documented as knowledge rather than as colour, in the voices and often the hands of the communities themselves. The Dalit digital counter-archives built in the lineage of Dalit Camera and Velivada did this work when no institution would fund it. Community radio, wherever the licensing regime has allowed it to breathe, demonstrates the core CCA principle that the margins theorize their own lives, that an Adivasi woman producing a radio programme in her own language is building communicative infrastructure that no metropolitan newsroom can substitute for. Voice infrastructures at the margins of the margins must be owned by the margins. Ownership is the difference between being spoken about and speaking.

I hold no illusions about the platforms on which much of this insurgent media currently lives. Platform capital and its surveillance technologies serve capital; that is their design, and I have described above how they serve Hindutva. And yet the CCA teaches attention to openings, to the ruptures within hegemonic structures through which agency moves. The same recommendation engine built to harvest attention has carried an independent creator’s election videos to hundreds of millions of views. The same WhatsApp that carries the rumour carries the fact-check, the strike call, the testimony from the demolition site. A rupture is an opening rather than a strategy, and the strategic question is what durable, owned infrastructure gets built through the openings before they close.

Which is why the horizon of my argument is the platform cooperative, the socialist, worker-owned platform as alternative media infrastructure. If the problem is ownership, the answer is ownership. In the Indian context, these resistance media infrastructures would lie at the intersections the CCA maps. Adivasi and Dalit ownership of media, so that the communities that caste and extraction work to erase control the means of narration. Working-class and Left politics, connecting media to union halls, land struggles, and the traditions of collective ownership rather than to venture capital. The organizing of hyper-precarious workers, the delivery riders, drivers, data annotators, and content moderators whose exploited labour is the hidden substrate of the digital and AI economy, and who have every reason to own the platforms they are currently ground through. And feminist and gender-diverse media architectures, because the troll apparatus is patriarchal in its very structure, and the infrastructures that answer it must be built around the safety, labour, and leadership of women and gender-diverse creators.

Khabar Lahariya, the rural newsroom run by Dalit and Bahujan women journalists, already prefigures this intersection, and it shows that the margins of the margins do not wait for permission. So did the media spaces created by Muslim women in the anti-CAA and anti-NRC protests, the libraries, stages, murals, poetry, and social media publics of Shaheen Bagh and its hundreds of sister sit-ins across the country, where women written off as voiceless built an entire communicative commons and read the Constitution back to the republic. There is real room here for connecting struggles and suturing solidarities, Dalit, Adivasi, Muslim, worker, feminist, queer, into shared media infrastructures for voice, and the CCA’s wager is that these sutures, built patiently and owned collectively, are what democratic futures are made of.

Layered above these formations sit the technical and policy tasks. Federated and decentralized platform architectures, so that de-platforming by a Meta or an X is survivable, with community-governed moderation in Indian languages rather than moderation outsourced to algorithms trained on English. Data sovereignty frameworks that treat community data as community resource. Sustained funding architectures, cooperative and philanthropic and public, that break dependence on the advertising economy that disciplines Indian media. And above all this, a renewed transnational politics, a digital NWICO, in which global South states and social movements together demand algorithmic transparency, interoperability mandates, and public interest obligations on platforms. The infrastructure question and the policy question have to move together.

Will these communities be permanently de-platformed otherwise? The trajectory points that way. Hindutva has demonstrated that whoever owns the amplification owns the public. The counter-lesson from every subaltern struggle I have worked alongside is that margins that build their own infrastructures of voice are the hardest to erase.

(to be continued)

Feaured Image Credit: www.newslaundry.com